Word: crude
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tertullian's "Credo quia absurdum." Now suddenly there is a new obsession with narrow historicity, and the Pope seems ready to jettison whatever and whoever did not "actually happen." It looks like a watershed: either much more will have to be dumped, or a return to a crude fundamentalism is in the works. Either way the Catholic Church is once more banking on Western man's visceral reluctance to stomach ahistorical myth...
...composed during the past half-century. He describes in an early novel the miraculous way in which a flat, abstract contrivance (in chess or art) can take on vitality and light: "Little by little, the pieces and squares began to come to life and exchange impressions. The crude might of the queen was transformed into refined power, restrained and directed by a system of sparkling levers; the pawns grew cleverer; the knights stepped forth with a Spanish caracole . . . Every creator is a plotter; and all the pieces impersonating his ideas on the board were here as conspirators and sorcerers...
...philosophical meaning should be attributed to his art. He dismisses such suggestions with the same scorn that he once made use of when a clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...
They bought him some teeth and a cornet, and threw together a band of unknown black jazzmen from New Orelans. In the fall, the old men gathered in a piano warehouse to make some home recordings because the professional studios in the city refused to record Negroes. When the crude recording machine was warmed up, Bunk stomped off the first number, "Make Me a Pallet on the Flood," and the "revival" of traditional jazz began...
Every advance is a new kind of failure. But it will dissolve some of our crude responses in the lucid light of increased sensitivity. The poetry is in the gesture, the reciprocity of effort